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Definition of art for art's sake in English:

art for art's sake

phrase

Used to convey the idea that the chief or only aim of a work of art is the self-expression of the individual artist who creates it.

‘The great thing about being in Calgary, as opposed to L.A., is that you kind of do art for art's sake, and comedy for comedy's sake.’

‘These artists see the value of their productions as art for art's sake as well as revelations of the truth and presentation of possibilities for their listeners.’

‘In a school setting, it's never art for art's sake.’

‘The bourgeois or decadent notions of disinterested investigation, scepticism, art for art's sake and so on, had no place in Soviet Russia or, for that matter, Nazi Germany.’

‘What needs to be stressed is that neither Khlebnikov nor his fellow Futurist poets were making the case for art for art's sake, for a poetry divorced from its larger cultural import.’

‘English cultural commentators have recently speculated that this hostility is more widespread, and that there is a deep historical and cultural resistance to the very idea of art for art's sake in Scotland.’

‘Having criticized art for art's sake for being potentially reactionary, they then focus on the counterproposal they offer to socialist realism and Stalinism.’

‘Ruskin's pre-Raphaelitism, for example, which stressed the moral purpose of art, contrasted Pater's aestheticism, which promoted the idea of art for art's sake.’

‘It's an odd looking movie that embraces the idea of art for art's sake.’

‘He understood best how to play the emotions, but his contemporaries are impatient with an aesthetic of art for art's sake.’